The Pentagon’s effort to create a unified, interoperable and secure IT framework across the full spectrum of operations may be more of a concept than a biddable contract, but industry has welcomed the programs that have come along with it.
From consolidation to optimization, firms across the country have supported efforts to create the Joint Information Environment (JIE) across the services and defense sub-agencies. It is not known exactly what has been spent toward fulfilling the JIE vision. Last week during markups of the National Defense Authorization Act, the House Armed Services Committee asked the Pentagon to quantify JIE-related programs and their potential savings. From industry’s perspective, the stakes are higher than the contract dollars on the table.
“This is something that’s an imperative that they all know they need to do to be successful,” said Chris Kearns, Lockheed Martin
’s [LMT] director of Global Systems Management Operations (GSM-O), in an interview with Defense Daily at the AFCEA JIE Mission Partners Symposium in Baltimore, Md. this week.
“I think growth is painful, I think change is painful, but there is a compelling reason for DoD to move forward with this,” said Angie Heise, Lockheed Martin vice president of Enterprise IT Solutions.
Despite undertones of cynicism at the symposium, Kearns and Heise are optimistic JIE will be realized. Heise cautioned against glossing over smaller successes on the road to completion. For example, Lockheed Martin will finish convergence of DoD network operations centers in Europe and the Middle East this year. Four regional centers will be merged into one, and a significant portion of the operations will be brought back from abroad to Scott and Hickham Air Force Bases in Illinois and Hawaii, respectively. Kearns said the consolidation will allow locations abroad to focus on mission activity and assurance instead of IT maintenance.
“Any time there’s major transformation–and that’s what JIE is calling for–I think you’re going to get some people who are nervous about it,” Heise said. “It’s not going to take weeks or months; it’s going to be years.”
Mark Belk, Juniper Network’s [JNPR] national government chief architect, said the commercial sector has more than just IT services to offer JIE.
“For them to be successful in this large of a mission, they really have to find ways to leverage some of the lessons learned in the existing cloud infrastructure,” he said.
Ideas from the cloud–like open standards, scalability and automation–can all be applied to defense networks, he said. While the DoD is large and complex, so are many commercial carriers. Belk believes JIE could be an opportunity for DoD to become more involved in helping craft commercial standards that it could adapt in-house.
Belk recognized, however, that the commercial sector optimizes around cost whereas DoD must meet mission requirements, now matter how far away the tactical edge lies. As for whether that makes industry’s job supporting JIE more or less difficult, he said it’s just “different.”
For Belk, claiming success for JIE could be as simple as showing no overspending on IT projects. Further success would be closing the delta between what the commercial sector delivers to its customers and what DoD delivers to its workforce.
“Someone in the future shouldn’t ever know how they big that delta could have gotten,” he said.
To close the gap, Belk said the department needs to focus on its network backbone to increase bandwidth. Juniper currently provides plumbing for the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) with data pumps, core routing and security. Necessary updates to this infrastructure include automatically steering network traffic, which gets to the heart of software-defined networking (SDN) concepts.
“If we can do that right, then we can really begin to see value and savings,” he said.
Belk is not the only JIE industry partner looking toward the future with SDN. The concept’s buzzword status at the symposium suggested the commercial sector may be driving the next wave in JIE projects. SDN has not been widely welcomed in the federal government, as agencies have hesitated waiting for others to take the plunge first.
“It’s outside the normal skill set of computer engineers,” sad Larry Sherrow, systems engineer for the federal civilian sector at Brocade [BRCD].
Brocade demonstrated a security application for SDN at the symposium. With distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as the number one threat against servers, Brocade devised a solution to automatically reroute DDoS traffic that would normally crash a server. Software recognizes the influx of traffic and its IP address, sending it to a bucket or another server where it won’t disrupt normal operations.
While SDN may take several years to transition into the government, Sherrow and his colleague Rick Macchio, systems engineer for U.S. federal sales, anticipate the networking method will be widespread.
“Five to eight years down the road I expect people to be doing [SDN],” Macchio said.